Computing devices are becoming increasing more powerful and portable. With the increase in portability, end-users have also increased their desire to easily and inexpensively attach portable peripheral components to their portable computing devices. For example, an end-user purchasing a portable cellular phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) may wish to connect to it an external keypad, remote audio control, headphones, a game control device, or other similar low-speed portable devices. Moreover, the end-user may wish to connect many peripheral components at the same time to the portable host device.
Today, however, the end-user is provided a limited selection of portable peripheral components. Often, the selection is limited to a microphone and headphones. This limitation may arise because a host device manufacturer has implemented a proprietary bus architecture. The result is that the end-user is further limited to the peripherals provided by a single manufacturer.
While several bus architectures, such as USB, I2C, and SPI, exist today, none of them provide a simple, cost-effective, low-speed portable device.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method for providing a general purpose, functional bus for chaining low-speed portable peripheral components to a portable host device. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.